


Beauty's Ensign Yet

by lyrithim



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Schneewittchen | Snow White (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Snow White Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Constructive Criticism Welcome, Eventual Happy Ending, F/M, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Pining, Royalty, Slow Burn, for some of the peripheral characters
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-30
Packaged: 2018-07-24 07:59:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7500348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyrithim/pseuds/lyrithim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snow White AU. Before the Good Prince James is assassinated via a poison apple, before the Winter Soldier terrorizes the kingdom of Scildan, there was just Bucky and Steve and lots of hopeless pining.</p><p>True Love’s Kiss will be involved at a certain point.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Orphan Boy

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Badly researched depictions of everything.
> 
> I tried to prevent this from morphing into a Merlin AU. My success is debatable.
> 
> If they happen to be reading this, big thanks to destielfuckyeah / theriarklecommittee and her sister for enduring all things related to this fic. You’re champs.
> 
> This is going to be so great and so terrible. Enjoy.

Bucky, being the future crown prince, was shoved to knighthood training at age six. It was a decision he greeted with many an unprincely tantrums and wails, but he would later remember the day he changed into the blue tunic and beige hoses of a boy-page as the day he met Steve:

The newly minted pages had gathered around a muddy spot near the Northern Tower, play-fencing with sticks and whatever else the second and third sons of noblemen did. Everyone, of course, wanted to spar with Bucky, but Bucky won easily—he was the prince, and he had been training unofficially since four. But there was a kid, a tiny blond runt who stayed his distance and just watched the rest of the boys silently. Bucky didn’t like it. With all the other boys falling in place, this was a break in the hierarchy.

“You!” he shouted at the boy, and tossed a stick his way. “I challenge you. To a spar.”

And there was a brief silence in the field, before the boys around him started clucking out taunts too. Bucky was quite proud of himself at this point. He was doing what his father always told him to do: lead his men.

The kid just looked down at the stick, then frowned at Bucky. “Shouldn’t we wait until later to fight?”

Bucky blinked. The prince wasn’t to be questioned. Everyone knew that.

The other pages gasped. Some of them were glancing at Bucky, now questioning his authority. This was verging into dangerous insubordination.

“Are you scared?” Bucky tried instead, crossing his arms to look bigger. “If you’re scared you can’t be here. We will be  _ knights _ one day. And we will fight bad things. Like dragons. And man-yee-corns. And witches. The bad ones,” he corrected himself quickly, remembering his mother's frown.

Red bloomed in the boy’s pale cheeks. “I can fight.”

“No you can’t!” the boy standing next to Bucky screeched. He was from the Hodge family, named Phil or Ill or something like that. “You’re so small and weak-looking. Any of us can beat you down anytime!”

“I can fight!” the boy said, angrier now. He picked up the stick that looked too long for his short arms. He locked in a sloppy stance. He glared at Bucky with something fierce, which Bucky didn’t understand, because Hodge was saying the much nastier things. “Do it.”

Someone was screaming “Duel to the death!” and someone else pushed Bucky forward. He was starting to have second thoughts about this whole thing, because the kid really did look skinny, too skinny compared to the other children. But things had come to this. He had no choice. He lifted his stick.

The boy was knocked down in two blows, and the other pages cheered. Bucky flinched away from the boy, who seemed almost sinking in his too-large tunic as he dragged himself back up. “Again,” he said.

Bucky wanted to tell him that it didn’t work that way: when you’re down, you’re down. People didn’t stand up again in real life. He drew his stick anyway. “The same thing will just happen again.”

The boy ignored him, and charged.

This time there were three blows involved before the boy was down again. But he got up, and he charged, and Bucky blocked him and knocked him down. It kept happening, and the boy got muddier and muddier, until Bucky’s heart  _ hurt _ with seeing the boy on the ground and he was about to say no more, stop, I command you—when a man roared, “What is happening here?”

It was Sir Phillips, their instructor. At this, the boy sprung away from Bucky and stood, his head down. He was panting so deeply Bucky thought he must be doubling in size with each inhale.

“Fighting, already, before your instructions have started?” Sir Phillips said, as he approached. Bucky felt a hot swell of shame in his stomach. “Am I seeing this right?”

“Not fighting!” the Hodge boy squeaked. “They were  _ sparring _ .”

Sir Phillips silenced him with a glare. Then he turned to the other boy. “You. I don’t recognize you. What is your name?”

“S—Steve, sir.”

An eyebrow rose so high that it threatened to break Sir Phillips’s hairline. “There isn’t— Who are your parents?”

The boy’s head remained down, but his shoulders were scrunched together now, as if anticipating a blow. He said nothing.

Sir Phillips planted his sword on the ground. “I asked you a  _ question _ , young sire.”

“My parents are—” his voice came out too quiet “—they’re—they’re dead.”

“Dead?” Sir Phillips said. “How can— What were their names? Which family were they from?”

It became obvious, embarrassingly obvious, that Steve was not a page at all, but a peasant child—a peasant orphan now, it would seem. The other children were sniggered softly during the interrogation, and Bucky felt horrible inside. He had done something wrong. He wasn’t sure what, but he had done something wrong, and if he didn’t do something now, he would never be able to right it.

“He’s my squire,” Bucky blurted out.

Sir Phillips straightened and looked at Bucky imperiously. “Squire?”

“He will be my squire,” Bucky corrected himself, “when I’m a knight. Crown prince. So. He’s training with me.”

Steve’s eyes were filled with pure astonishment. Sir Phillips looked back and forth between Bucky and the boy—Steve—a few times before giving a long, weary exhale. “There isn’t space for people like you here, boy,” he said, facing Steve. “Not if you want to become a knight eventually.”

Steve looked up, and that color in his cheek was back. “I want to fight, sir—” But something in Sir Phillips’s voice must have stopped more words from coming out of his mouth. Steve was glaring at the ground again.

“But sir—” Bucky protested.

“Erskine is in need of a second pair of hands to help with his medicines, and for someone to run to the apothecary now and then,” Sir Phillips continued. “Take Steve to the clinic, won’t you, Prince James? Tell the doctor that I sent him.”

“I—” Bucky looked at Steve, who had jumped a little. “Yes.”

Bucky took Steve’s hand and dragged him toward the castle. Steve’s hands were so small—was he really six years old? He was like a  _ baby _ . As they made their way for the tower entrance, there came Sir Phillips’s voice, barking at the rest of the pages: “Line up straight, the rest of you. And make yourself presentable. I’ll have to hand you over to the ladies of the court later…”

The kingdom of Scildan was wealthy, so the king’s castle, the Triskelion, was naturally one of the largest and most fortified in the region. This meant that Doctor Erskine’s clinic, located in the Eastern Tower, was a good distance away from the northern fields. Steve did not talk at all as they stumbled past maids, bakers, and the occasional lord or lady—all of whom bowed as Bucky walked past. Bucky found himself babbling enthusiastically about the doctor and his niece Margaret, who tended to him when he got into his many scraps.

Halfway through, Steve slipped his hand out of Bucky’s and slid down the wall. Sunlight, which had sunk into the hallway through an open window, seemed to reach out and tousle Steve’s golden hair.

“I want to—” Steve said. “I want to rest a bit.”

Bucky squinted at him. “Are you tired?”

“No!” said Steve. “I just—I just want to rest.”

Bucky knelt by his side. “I can carry you,” he promised.

Steve peered at him. “Why are you so nice now?”

“I’m not!” Bucky said at once. Then, confused, he said, “I mean, I’m  _ being _ nice to you. But I’m not nice. I’m—I’m mean and am-bu-shous. Like other princes.”

“Oh,” said Steve. He tucked his hands beneath his armpits. “Are you really the prince?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Of course.”

“But the prince is supposed to be polite and kind,” Steve said. “Not a bully.”

Bucky felt that roiling sensation in his stomach again. He suddenly thought of how his mother would have reacted to his behavior earlier. His fingers sketched out patterns on the dust on the ground. “Well,” Bucky huffed, but could not continue.

Steve watched him quietly before saying, “Are you really taking me to Doctor Erskine?”

“Of course I am. You ask such weird questions.”

Steve shrugged. “Aunt Allisoun said I was too small to work in the fields, so she was going to send me to the goldsmith to be his apprentice, after I get fifty sticks for the fireplace.” He smiled. “I know how to count to one hundred.” Then his smile disappeared. “But the donkey cart left when I came back from the forest.”

“Your aunt is not a nice person,” Bucky said.

“’S okay. I always want to come here anyway. Mama used to tell me stories about knights when I was a baby. A nice dame gave me these clothes and some food when I told her this.” Steve bit lower lip. “But now…”

Bucky considered this. “My cousin Thor said being a page is boring anyway.” He grabbed Steve’s shoulders. “I’ll teach you all I know. Like hunting. And riding horses. And other knight-y things. And then when we’re older, I’ll ask the king to knight you. We’re going to be the best knights in the kingdom.” He grinned. “Sir Steve.”

Steve ducked his head. Bucky was fascinated. So the kid could be something other than fiercely confrontational and mildly curious. “And you’ll be—” he hesitated, “Prince James?”

Bucky made a face. “Only adults I don’t know call me James,” he said. “My name is Bucky.”

“That sounds like a made-up name,” Steve told him, except he was grinning, too. He mulled over the name and tried it out: “Prince Bucky.”

“Captain Steve,” Bucky parroted back.

Steve said then that they had rested enough and should leave soon, because Bucky was due to return to Sir Phillips soon. Except, as soon as Steve rose to his feet, he fainted.

Steve’s skin was too hot when Bucky slung him, frantic, over his back. His breaths came out insubstantially shallow, but he was otherwise still, responding none at all to Bucky’s repeated calls of his name. After locking Steve’s arms around his neck and locking his knees by his hips, Bucky raced for the Eastern Tower.

It seemed to take forever for them to get to the clinic. There were so many adults in his way, but Bucky swerved away from them all—he didn’t have time to bow prettily to them, with his feet together and his back stiff and strong, like his mother taught him. (He would realize, later, that they were probably trying to help the little prince and his little friend, but at the moment he heard nothing but Steve’s heartbeat.) The castle, which had never seemed foreign to him, now became a giant maze of corridors and too-tall limbs.

Doctor Erskine was not there when he burst through the door, but his niece was, and that was almost as good: at age eight, Margaret Carter was practically an adult. She dropped the mortar and pestle she had been holding to help Steve into the nearest bed. There, she smoothed away his sweaty bangs, placed the back of her hand over Steve’s forehead, and checked his pulse.

“What happened to him?” Bucky asked, his voice sounding very small even to his own ears.

“A fever, your highness,” she said, as she stood on a stool to reach for a vial in the high shelf.

Bucky swallowed. “Is he going to die?”

“No, he won’t,” she said, steady. “Not after you’ve brought him here.” She drew for Steve a cup of water, mixed the content of the vial in, and turned to Bucky. “Can you get a towel from—yes, there. Wet it and give it to me.”

Bucky did as he was told with trembling hands. Margaret proceeded to wipe across Steve's brows and, after taking off his muddy sweat-soaked tunic, his chest. She whispered soft reassurances in his ear when he stirred, then guided him gently upward for a sip of the concoction, before letting him sink back to his pillows. Miraculously, his color seemed to fade just a bit.

Margaret gave Steve’s forehead a small kiss, then turned to Bucky, who had watched all this at the side with a wild helplessness that he wasn’t used to, not as the prince. She smiled. “He just needs rest now.”

Bucky nodded, then dragged the stool he was sitting on closer to Steve, so that at least he could guard him now, like the castle sentry, against any evil or sickly spirits that came Steve’s way. In his periphery, he could see Margaret linger for a bit before returning to the work table. It would take a while until he recognized her earlier words for the soft dismissal that they were, but by then Margaret had handed a basin full of water and a wet towel, commanding Bucky to change the one across Steve's forehead every quarter of an hour.

The sounds of pestle grinding against mortar, then the clink of dishes, pattered at the corner of Bucky’s consciousness. It was when Bucky found that he could match the pace of his own breathing with Steve’s that Margaret began asking about Steve—his name, where he was from, how he came to be here, how Bucky knew him. Now that Steve was resting, Bucky felt shy all of a sudden and answered stutteringly. At some point, Margaret told Bucky to call her Peggy instead, and he managed to tell her his preferred name too in the rush of gladdened surprise that followed.

The doctor returned some time after: Bucky recognizes this at the periphery of his consciousness by the collective flutter of bedsheets folding themselves into place by Doctor Erskine’s magic. The man shuffled over to Steve’s side and performed the same perfunctory checks that Margaret—Peggy—had done. Then he dropped a heavy hand on Bucky’s head. “Your highness, Sir Phillips has been asking after you. The other pages are with Lady Harding, and it would not do to abandon your instructions with the other boys, especially on the first day.”

Bucky looked up, panicked. “I can’t leave, Doctor Erskine. Steve needs me.” He swallowed. “I'll write a letter of apology to Lady Harding and everything. In my very, very best handwriting. And to Sir Phillips too. But I can’t leave.”

“I had said as much,” Doctor Erskine said, a note of fondness in his voice. “Do not worry, my little prince. I had known something was wrong—it is simply so unlikely to me, that the good Prince James would forsake his duties unless something urgent had happened.” He rubbed the corners of his eyes, then smiled tiredly, but kindly still. “Either way, Steve will need someone he knows when he wakes up, and I see that you have become good friends.” He settled on a stool next to Bucky. “So this is my new apprentice?”

Bucky nodded vigorously. “You will love him. He’s really smart, because he said he can count to one hundred. He’s really brave—even though he is a bit stupid about it—and he will work really hard. He said his Auntie Allisoun said he was too small, but he’s not, he’s  _ not _ , and she shouldn’t have left him like that, it’s not right…”

Doctor Erskine listened to his passionate defense of Steve for a long while before he excused himself to finish some potion work. Peggy became once again the audience of his stories of Steve Rogers—which were numerous, despite their having only met hours before.

Bucky waited for a long time, and he knew this because the doctor and Peggy shared some of their dinner figs and sweet gruel with him at one point. But he waited past that. It wasn’t a busy day for the clinic: there were a couple of servants who came in for a check-up, and once a lord groaning loudly about a small cut across his finger, but otherwise the room was filled with the quiet, companionable sounds of Peggy’s lessons on potion-making and Doctor Erskine directing his magic to tidy up shop.

Steve regained consciousness once during the whole affair. His eyes were still filmed with fever when he opened them, and when he asked, “Bucky?” Bucky’s immediate response was “Go back to sleep.”

And Steve obeyed.

But then Bucky was falling asleep too at some point past the clock tower’s tenth strike. The next thing he remembered was a pair of soft arms lifting him from the stool, and he smelled familiar perfume.

“Mother,” he protested, squirming.

“It's time for you to go to bed, Bucky,” Queen Winifred replied, light.

Even when he was younger, Bucky had heard many times of the rare, bordering strange, closeness the queen seemed to have developed with her son. Bucky had a nurse of his own still, but it was always his mother who played hide-and-go-seek with him in the gardens, his mother who tucked him into bed at night. He thought nothing of the servants’ and lords’ raised eyebrows. To spend time with his mother was the most natural thing to him in the world.

Bucky opened his eyes. “Wait,” he said, “I need to see…” and he climbed groggily down from the queen’s shoulders and leaned against Steve’s bed frame.

Steve looked not at all sick now, just asleep. But to be sure, he leaned his forehead against Steve’s and found that the heat had passed. He reached back to curl his fingers around his mother’s hand, and as they made to leave, Bucky gave Steve’s brow a small kiss.

—

This memory won’t be the first to go. But it will dissolve soon enough.


	2. The Asgardian Delegation (Part I)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The boys go through puberty and start getting a lot of confusing, conflicting feelings. Some Asgardians visit Scildan for the annual celebration of the marriage treaty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next are connected, but I’ve cut it at a place that is hopefully coherent as its own chapter. Hope you enjoy.

“We should stop,” Bucky said, frowning.

Steve’s wooden longsword was still up, but it was wavering visibly, the tip of the blade drawing wide spirals in the air. He shook his head. “You’ve already—already mastered these forms months ago,” he panted. “I need to catch up.”

“Hey, don’t be so hard on yourself. You are up against the best swordsman of our class, after all. And a prince. I’m sure you can beat Hodge anytime, easy.”

“I will be a man someday,” Steve insisted, “and I live in the castle just like anyone else. I got no right to do any less than any of you. I need to make sure I can defend Scildan in a battle.”

“We’re not going to war anytime soon,” Bucky laughed. “We’re at peacetime. Believe me, the knights of Scildan are going to stay bored and fat until one hundred years after I die.”

Steve didn’t hesitate. “Even so, I want to be right there, by your side.”

In the years since Steve Rogers entered Doctor Erskine’s care, he had slowly filled in between the bones. But though he no longer suffered from coughs and flus on a weekly basis as he did when he was six, Steve was still smaller than Bucky and their peers, many of them squires now at age fifteen. At Steve’s words, Bucky felt that lurking, but growing, unease within himself swell.

There was a part of Bucky that just  _ didn’t _ want to see Steve anywhere near an armor. Not long ago, the king had taken Bucky on his annual tour to every village of the kingdom for the very first time in Bucky’s life. The journey itself was mostly eye-opening—Bucky wanted, always, to know the people of Scildan, those who would eventually become his people—save for one small detour. After surveying the major trading posts, the king directed his men to the northern fort, which bordered the neighboring kingdom of Jötunheimr. When he left Bucky to meet with his officers, Bucky managed to evade his own attendants and wandered into one of the adjoining towers, and there he witnessed a sort of horror: a row of knights and magicians, lying groaning and bloody atop a dozen beds. Some of them wore wounds wider than Bucky’s palms; the others had missing limbs, cracked skulls, or displaced innards. Bucky had stood at the doorway, frozen, until one of the nurses ducking among the men saw him and shooed him away.

“If you say so,” Bucky said.

Steve nodded and snapped out the command to commence. They then lunged.

After Steve’s fifth defeat, however, Bucky’s tutor and a trail of Bucky’s own attendants managed to find them. They ran toward Bucky and Steve in a distant stampede, with the tutor leading charge. Shouts of “Your highness!” could be heard.

“Aw, crap,” Bucky said, sheathing his practice sword.

Steve laughed as he picked up a couple sheets of paper from the ground. “Told you we should’ve just gone for the woods.”

“Yes, yes.” Bucky grinned at Steve. “Race you?”

Even dirt-streaked, bruised, and panting, Steve was glancing up at him with that fierce, competitive gleam in his eye. “The usual spot?”

“Of course.”

Their foot races were always an even fight, with Bucky, more than Steve, at a natural disadvantage. Because even though Steve suffered from chronic shortness of breath—asthma, the Greeks were supposed to have called it—Bucky tended to be the object of the tutors’, servants’, noblemen’s, or cooks’ chase. The two of them split up directions immediately, and the half a dozen or so of Bucky’s least favorite people nipped at his heels like a herd of hunting dogs into the woods. It was a fierce chase, and for a moment Bucky was almost—almost—worried that he would not be able to meet up with Steve again; that was, until Bucky managed to shake them off by ducking into a shallow gorge.

As he staggered into their place of rendez-vous, Bucky bemoaned to Steve of his difficulties, the endless energy that fury seemed to supply to his persecutors. They were persistent; they were inhuman; they were malicious. It was the flight of Bucky’s life.

“I’m sure,” Steve said, sitting cross-legged among the cool shades of the giant tree hollow.

“Mr. Rolfe threatened to bash my head in with an inkpot,” Bucky said, as he laid down by Steve’s side.

Steve laughed, completely unsympathetic. “And did he?”

“No,” Bucky said. “I ducked.”

The intended plan upon arriving here was always to practice some more fencing, or knife-fighting, or javelin-throwing, but the place was so idyllic, so familiar, so established as a place of comfort, that any work was difficult, even for Steve. They skipped stones for a few rounds—Steve, as usual, out-skipped him in double the number—before Bucky decided to sunbathe on the narrow beach, his tunic and linen undershirt folded to his side, and Steve leaned against the tree in the shade and sketched.

When they were ten, and still played such childish games as Magicians and Knights in the woods, Bucky lost a necklace, one with tiny portraitures of his parents. The two of them searched, but a thunderstorm settled in, and Bucky—over Steve’s protests—dragged the two of them back toward the castle. Except, the rain was thick enough that they lost their way, and Steve began shivering and choking out loud, throaty coughs. They tucked themselves into the first shelter they found—the arch beneath a centuries’ old black poplar tree. When the rain stopped, they found themselves in midst of a beautiful sight: the silvery stretch of a glittering pond, dressed in the thin satin sashes of the moonlit mist.

The necklace itself was left mysteriously on his chamber’s dresser a few weeks later, the silver covered with the slightest traces of black tarnish. When he questioned the maidservants, all they did was smile and shake their heads. The lake itself had become their little haven ever since.

When his skin tingled just a little too rawly, Bucky picked up his shirts and, after a moment of deliberation, crawled his way up behind Steve, with the sole intention of embarrassing his friend. He wondered which courtier it was this time in a monkey suit in Steve’s sketches, which earl’s caricatured son bawling his eyes out over the slightest scratch. A royal court’s clinic is always ripe for inspirations in satire.

But Steve was drawing Peggy.

It was unmistakably her: those high cheeks and curled brown hair alone marked her likeliness. But there was also something about the way that she was drawn. Her neck was curved like a swan’s, but with the dignity of a saint. Her large, lovely doe eyes beckoned.

Something gnarled and ugly inside Bucky wanted to rip the picture out of Steve’s hands.

Instead, he asked, “What is that?”

Steve gasped and folded the paper back by its creases, shoving it under his shirt immediately. “Nothing,” he said.

A thousand mockeries unfurled from Bucky’s thoughts—but he caught himself. What was he doing? He smiled. He stepped back. He punched Steve on the shoulder. “It’s too late. You can’t tell me that was nothing. That was Peggy, wasn’t it?”

“No—” He sighed. “Yes.” His voice rose a pitch. “It’s nothing, okay? I just thought—I’ve done a lot of pictures of you, and I wanted to—to draw her one.”

“Well,” Bucky said, “I’ve heard that love portraits may become the fashion these days. Rather than love poetry.”

“I don’t have intentions towards her,” Steve said stiffly, and Bucky would believe him then, if Steve weren’t swallowing hard and looking side-to-side among the lawn of weeds.

“But you know,” Bucky mused, “she’s seventeen. And you’re only turning fifteen in the summer. She’s at marriageable age—you’re a tiny runt still. Isn’t she just a little too old for you?”

“Maybe you say that because you can’t handle anything more mature than a dalliance with a maid,” Steve all but snapped. As soon as he blurted out the confession, he covered his eyes and curled himself into a ball on the ground. 

Steve, it seemed, had already caught the bug of love-sickness, and illness ran deep. Bucky didn’t expect this. He questioned why he shouldn’t have expected this. The answer flashed into his mind immediately— _ Steve was to be with  _ him—but the thought left Bucky so hot and cold with confusion and self-disgust that he shook it away.

Seventeen. He wished he could be seventeen.

“Of all the girls in Scildan, you had to choose Peggy,” Bucky said, in lieu of anything that was threatening to break out of his mind. Steve had to know that something was wrong with Bucky. Bucky thought the whole world knew that he was himself practically nailing his fingers to the ground to do—something, he didn’t know what. But Steve had to know.

“You’ve had a turn with many of them already,” Steve said. “Narrows down my choices a bit.”

“Kissing is nothing,” Bucky dismissed. “And I’ve tried to introduce some of them with you.”

“You know why those girls won’t give me the time of day.”

“Come on. You know any girl would be lucky to have you. They just need to know you.”

Steve shrugged.

“So,” Bucky said in the silence, “Peggy, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s a good person,” Bucky said. “I wish you good luck.”

Steve had turned to stare at Bucky, Bucky knew, though he was staring into a corner of the forest. “What, that’s it? I expected more from you.”

“What can I say?” Bucky said. He threw a flat piece of rock viciously over the pond’s surface. “Can’t I just be happy to see my friend wander through life, jolly as a magpie?”

_ He has to know, has to know, has to know _ , Bucky’s heart beated. Has to know what, Bucky had no idea, but the discovery seemed eminent, and fear and elation contorted into one in that finger-snap space in time, in the silence before Steve’s reaction.

But Steve just snorted and kicked Bucky in the shin.

—

The stone walls of Scildan had just thrown off their frosted edges, with the last crumbs of the post-Easter feast barely swept away, when All Fool’s Day passed in its usual series of catastrophes and the castle was once again flung into a flurry of preparation. The Asgardian delegation was to stay for a week until the middle of April to honor the wedding anniversary between King George and Queen Winifred—as well as the treaty signed as a result of their marriage. Various other token dignitaries were also scheduled to arrive. The castle staff strained to hold in their complaints in front of Bucky, but they made sure he heard their whispers loud and clear as soon as he turned his back.

Well,  _ Bucky  _ hadn’t set his parents’ wedding date. These people were confusing cause and effect.

As a result of these preparations, his manservants had colluded with his attendants in their monitoring of Bucky, lest the little prince stuck his clumsy fifteen-year-old foot into sheets of new curtains or a triple-layered cake, and Bucky was additionally looped into a double-duty rotation of etiquette, Asgardian culture, and horsebacking classes. As was the case in past years, he was utterly collared and could not find a single moment to escape to Steve.

_ Dear S, _ he wrote instead, while pretending to listen to Mr. Rolfe.

_ What to do when you honestly don’t give a damn about which Asgardian god fucked which of his brother’s goats? _

_ Your friend, _

_ B _

He placed the note behind a heavy chunk of loosened rock in a wall near the library room. (The side of the rock still had the years’-old markings of BB AND SR on its side.) Sure enough, another scrappy piece of paper appeared there the next day.

_ Dear B, _

_ Pay attention. I’m sure you’re just picking out the strangest possible story out of an otherwise fascinating lecture. _

_ Speaking of goats, P was sent away the other day to treat a few townsmen whose thigh was punctured from trying to ride a couple. She was very annoyed + talked for hours about how stupid young men can get around each other. She might mean us too. _

_ Sincerely, _

_ S _

The conversation multiplied itself from there on, and Bucky used up so much paper that he had to bribe a servant girl to deliver additional stacks. She was all smiles and winks when she delivered them, even after he clarified that they were for  _ Steve _ , not a lady paramour.

Steve’s seventh letter asked for a pause in their weekly sparring lessons. Bucky acquiesced.

—

After forever and no time at all, the day of welcoming arrived at last. Within half an hour of the herald’s arrival, Bucky saw the tall pennants of the Odinson family sprinkle pastel colors across the grassy northern hills. A group of knights were sent forward as escorts, and before long Bucky could hear the stomps of those foreign drums, first as subtle as a pulse then as shaking as thunder. Finally, then, the Asgardians, with their grand horses and voluminous robes, floated through the ancient arches and enter the main hall of the Triskelion.

Standing next to the throne of his father, Bucky watched as Prince Thor, heir apparent to the crown, swaggered past neat lines of Scildan’s counts, countesses, magicians, and knights, then knelt before the king. His entourage, including his sallow-faced brother Loki, fanned out behind him, before following suit. The drumbeats ceased.

The king rose. The silence thickened. He spoke.

“Twelve moons has it been since last we feasted, drank, and danced next to our northern cousins,” he said. “Routine may our meetings be, but kinship flouts the biddings of the spheres. So seasons stretch and wrap themselves around your absence; likewise, here the days did seem to hold a film of winter gray in wait of your arrival. I the king, as head of my people, thank you for blessing Scildan with this delegation from Asgard, including youths like you, who give me pleasant recollections of those apple blossoms that had drifted outside of the frosted church windows the morning of a joyous day, a decade then six years ago.”

His father had overdone the speech a little, Bucky thought. He glanced to the back, ready to make eye contact with Steve as he always did when the full court was in session. Steve was standing next to Doctor Erskine in the far end of the throne room, but he was not looking at him at all—he was laughing, heads together with Peggy, at some private joke.

Thor bent lower, which seemed an impressive feat given how muscle-bound his neck was.

“The honor’s ours, your majesty, but I have to protest,” responded Thor in kind, parrying the king’s words in this annual battle of courtly language. “If seasons here have circumscribed our dirt-bound heap of mortals, green with youth and ignorance, then it is but because, my kinsmen fair, you are the heaven-slept stars who hold us deep enthrall. If days grow cold when we, reluctant, leave, then it is but the leeching of that too-warm element, hot brashness.” He looked up the dais, to the throne and the royal family. “Now we gather here in one space, allies of blood, to celebrate the union of our two kingdom, and most of all, the marriage that had made us kin.”

The court waited in bated breath as the king considered Thor, stroking his thumb across his thick black mustache. Finally, he chuckled. “You know how to humor an old man.”

“Never old,” Thor insisted, smiling openly. In his presence, Bucky found it easy to understand why Thor was always the ideal of a prince and young man in the king’s mind. “Never humoring.”

The king yielded his attention to Queen Winifred, the only blood relation to Thor and Loki in the room other than Bucky himself. She did not stand, but she did not need to in order to capture the attention of the court. “You speak well,” she said, smile widening. Her approval washed over Scildanians, Asgardians, all, in a cleansing breeze. “Welcome, nephews.”

A long proceeding of officials, including Loki, followed suit in their speeches. The sun had run half its course by the time the court was dismissed in preparation for the evening feast. Then, the king was swept away by the more elder members of the delegation. Bucky’s mother stayed behind to speak a few more words to Thor and Loki before returning to the banquet hall: she was needed there to direct the proceedings of the kitchen. Out of respect to Scildan’s customs, the Asgardian delegation never brought a lady of the court with them to Scildan.

Bucky waited until the more impatient noblemen left the throne room, until the swathe of chaos that entangled royal houses after the departure of the king began to thin, until he really had no excuse at all to wait, and he descended from the throne he had leaned against to the floor below.

Thor spotted him almost at once, and he disentangled himself from the long ceremonial greetings of Lady  Hastings to give Bucky a bear hug that lifted him a foot off the floor.

“You’ve grown bigger, little Bucky,” Thor boomed as Bucky was returned to stable ground.

“Yet you’re always a head taller,” Bucky retorted, in Asgardian.

Thor beamed. “Your pronunciation has improved.” He looked around, and seemed to pull Loki out of nowhere between two knights. “Brother dear, here’s your playmate.”

“Ha, ha,” Loki replied as he glided past, apathetically polite. His cheeks were paler and more sunken than ever. Loki was a magician in training, and he lacked both the physical girth of his brother and his sunnier disposition. If Bucky did not know better, he would have thought them unrelated. “Hello, Prince James. As usual, a pleasure to come to your...” he paused delicately, “...kingdom.”

This was the reason, Bucky reminded himself, that they were as much playmates as Bucky was to Baron Brandt.

“It is good to see you too,” Bucky replied.

Thor and Bucky began catching each other up on a year’s worth of gossip, during which Loki slipped away, no doubt to plan some dastardly deed or snub Scildan’s few magicians, as usual. During a story about catching Jim, a fellow squire, being tugged along a voluptuous village girl behind the royal stables, Bucky remembered that that he was supposed to meet with his attendants back in his bedchambers—but, well, they should know better than to expect him to return to their bear traps again. As the conversation moved from topic to topic, so did he and Thor move themselves from the throne room to the parapets and across various towers, before the evening bells tolled and they headed for the great hall to dine.

Dinner featured finely decorated plates, starting with tiny cuts of stuffed eggs that evolved into dozens of roasted geese and freshly killed boars. As was Scildan tradition, off-duty members of the castle staff shared the meals, but in tables on the opposite end of the hall as the royal family’s and, in this case, their guests’ seats. The royal dining area was raised on a dais, which meant that Bucky could see Steve’s little blond bob of a head next to Peggy’s. In any other occasion, Bucky would be communicating with Steve over a series of eyebrow raises, pointed stares, mimes, and exaggerated expressions—but not this case, it would seem.

Thor was shoving large quantities of food into his mouth. This should have made him incoherent, but he was perfectly articulate as he asked, “Bucky my cousin, I believe I have made much talk regarding Sif and Fandral, Hogun, and Volstagg—yet you talk of your Steve not at all. Why do your eyes seem to mourn when you looked at him just now?”

“I wasn’t looking at him,” Bucky said quickly. He noted at the large roast in the center of the table. “My eyes were mourning for the loss of this steak.”

“That does deserve some remembrance,” Thor agreed and, thankfully, let the topic drop. Thor straddled the line between dumb obliviousness and subtle perceptiveness—Bucky could never tell which. But it was what Bucky liked about him.

“How do you look forward to the tournament?” Bucky asked, careful now to not let his eyes stray again to Steve’s general direction. “You’ll dominate the hammer-throwing competition, of course—”

“And archery for you,” Thor grinned.

“I’m not competing in that anymore,” Bucky said, gathering around the last of the peas on his plate. “The king disapproves. Said it’s not manly, that archers are the cowards of the battlefield.”

Thor made a noise of vague disapproval in his throat; it was not his place to speak against a foreign king, even if he were his uncle. “The crowds will miss a good display of talent, then.”

Bucky smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “But those events aren’t what I meant, when I asked about the festival.”

“Ay,” Thor said, sinking back in his seat, crossing his arms just a bit smugly, “the knights’ tournament. Tell me, how is Scildan’s competition this year?”

“Oh, don’t expect to cut through the tournament like you did last year,” Bucky warned him, laughing. “Dum Dum—I mean, Sir Dugan—has long since recovered from his injuries, and he did, as expected, take all the other tournaments in Scildan since then. Now he’s just been waiting for you to return that title.”

The edges of Thor’s lips quirked down in the self-assured, noncommittal way of a young champion prince. “Well, we can see about that—tell me, what of the other competitors?”

“The ones in Scildan are all, of course, betting on Sir Dugan to, pardon my language, fucking whoop your ass. Some of the foreign knights and their squires arrived, but none with much of a reputation for sword fighting. More are due by dawn at the end of the week, before the preliminaries.”

“And you’ve still not entered this year?”

“I’ve yet to graduate from knighthood,” he reminded his cousin.

“This again?” Thor took a swig of mead. “I never did understand the purpose of the king my uncle for placing you with the rest of the squires.”

“I’ve—it wasn’t him initially. It was my mother who added me to the list of committed pages, all those years ago.”

“Oh, I am—surprised,” Thor said, as if struggling with the concept of the last word. “Queen Winifred had held many records in the Asgardian court for archery, but she had private training exclusively with the elder Heimdall, like the rest of the royal family.”

Bucky snapped his head toward Thor. “My mother—I didn’t know she practiced archery.”

Thor’s eyebrows arched up. “No? She was not the one who oversaw your marksmanship lessons?”

On the other side of the king, Bucky’s mother was laughing with the chief of the Asgardian delegation. She had been the one to hand Peggy a dagger years ago, Bucky remembered, a few days after Doctor Erskine mentioned Peggy was ready to look after the town’s patients on her own. This was the same woman whose arguments with the king on the role of women in the court shook the walls of the throne room and inevitably entered Bucky’s ears; the same woman who encouraged his friendship with Steve; the same woman who fed him soup when he was sick. Bucky found himself saying, “No, I— No, she was not.”

The constrained decorum that ruled the great hall soon unwound into spilt mead and choruses of laughter. In time, Thor excused himself, his arms wound around a giggly servant girl.  Bucky left the royal dais after his third, or fourth, or fifth cup of wine to find fellow squires Gabriel, Montgomery, Jim, and Jacques already singing tavern songs shoulder-to-shoulder. He joined in.

Things were a bit of a blur afterwards. That night was one of Bucky’s first times drinking—and first time drunk—and he was quite a riot among his quartet of friends, who were also at the deeper ends of inebriation. After numerous songs and numerous regrettable dances, Bucky slapped the table twice and told the others that he had to  _ leave, _ he was a  _ prince, _ he had  _ responsibilities. _ While the rest of them nodded along, Gabriel proclaimed that, then, the duties of the prince’s attendants had to fall on the four of them, the lesser mortals. Before Bucky could protest, they grabbed Bucky by his four limbs, and thusly was he escorted out of the great hall.

The journey up to Bucky’s quarters—located in one of the highest chambers of the Western Tower—was a tremendous struggle, even for mighty warriors-to-be. Bucky eventually reclaimed his right to walk on his two feet again, but collective movement was difficult divided among the five of them. They had barely managed up their second flight of stairs when a voice called out, “Bucky?”

Their balance, already wobbling, was tipped over completely, and the five of them broke apart and tripped down differing number of steps. Bucky managed to catch himself by the banister, and he was heaving out such laughter it took a few seconds before he remembered that there was another person present. He straightened himself and squinted through the dark.

“Hey there,” Bucky drawled, then giggled.

“Hey there to you too,” Steve said, amused. “Thought you’d be in bed by now.”

“Thought I might surprise you,” Bucky said, his voice exaggeratedly low and completely failing at being sultry. His friends snorted and laughed. Bucky was also attempting to wink flirtatiously, but alcohol was slowing his limbs’ responses, and he doubted that Steve could see him in the dark anyway.

Steve clapped twice. “Well, I can take our prince from here, if you don’t mind, fellas.”

“But Steve, you’re so  _ skinny _ ,” Bucky said, dragging out the last word. “How can you take a tall, strong man like me?”

His friends guffawed.

“Bitty Stevie,” Montgomery chorused, halfway down the stairs.

“Little Stevie,” Jim cooed, wedged in a little corner to the side.

“You get to talk,” Gabriel called out near Bucky. “He’s nearly as tall as you and Jacques.”

“But is he as big?” Jacques directed a leer at Steve.

“Oi, back off, Dernier.” Bucky flicked a pebble at him. “That’s enough.”

“What’s that for?” Jacques whined.

“Only I get to call him Stevie.” Bucky looked to Steve. “Help me back, won’t you?”

Steve did a little bow and all, the little shit. “Of course,” he said, slinging one of Bucky’s arms around his shoulder. Just like old times, perhaps, with the roles reversed. “And Jacques?”

“Yeah?” Jacques responded from the bottom of the stairs.

“Mine is definitely bigger.”

Bucky’s friends went wild at that.

“You have a sailor’s tongue,” Bucky said, once they were up another flight of stairs.

“Just because I don’t use the insults the squires use doesn’t mean I can’t defend myself,” Steve said.

“No,” Bucky agreed. “You just punch your way out of things, usually.”

Steve chuckled. But, Bucky noted with his head pressed against the crook of Steve’s neck, his breaths were coming out more labored, his pulse drumming more heavily. Suddenly sober, Bucky lifted himself away from Steve so only his arm touched Steve’s shoulders. Steve glanced his way.

“You can walk?”

Bucky squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. The world around him was clearer this way. “Yeah,” he said.

The night air brushed across Bucky’s face, as light as silk, as loose as white sand. Bucky hoped it was an augury for a good summer to come, and then a good harvest for autumn. Outside, even though Bucky couldn’t see it, the moonlight must have streaked the castle walls in cool light, because some was pulled through the castle windows and scattered along the cold stone tiles. He and Steve walked through those little puddles of silver, their forms appearing and disappearing in the dappled light, like those little skipping stones across their pond in the forest.

There was a gentleness in the night, Bucky thought—then thought otherwise when they arrived at his bedroom, where he misjudged the distance between him and his bed. He would have fallen flat on the ground if Steve hadn’t caught his sorry ass last-minute and all but threw him on his blankets.

“Ow,” Bucky whined softly.

“You know,” Steve said, panting, “you should really get rid of your actual attendants. They never seem to be here when you actually need them, and when you don’t, they trail you like hounds.”

“I never need them,” Bucky slurred. He was too sleepy to even open his eyes at this point. “ _ I _ always take care of  _ you _ when you fight strangers on the  _ street. _ ’S like payin’ debt this time.”

“You always make it sound worse than it actually is,” Steve protested lightly.

“You’d’ve punched Baron Brandt ’least  _ twice, _ ” Bucky insisted, “if I hadn’t stopped you.”

“He would have deserved it.” Steve snorted. “You know, I really look forward to seeing you get that splitting headache in the morning.”

“Liar,” Bucky said, “like you’d be here to see it.”

He didn’t quite realize the words had slipped out until they did, and the mortification that followed was something even inebriation could not mask. He stared at the curves on his footboard. In the realm of male friendship, to express any sort of emotion for the other person other than joking hatred and the occasional battle-weighed appreciation was taboo. Bucky might have just done the spiritual equivalent of self-castration.

It seemed forever until any sound came from Steve. Then, Bucky felt a dip in the mattress, and he squeezed his eyes shut again. Before long, he could feel the subtle warmth of another human body.

“Hey,” Steve said.

Bucky opened his eyes. Steve’s face was half an arm’s length away.

“Hey, you,” Bucky croaked back.

“I was walking Peggy back to her room earlier, but when I went back to the great hall, you weren’t there anymore,” Steve said. “So I came up here to find you.”

“Yeah?”

“You and I, we’d usually—sneak out, in other feasts. But you seemed to be having fun, so,” said Steve, like he was trying to explain something. “I walked Peggy home after that.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. He should ask Steve how he was doing on that front, but he didn’t want to, not at this moment. He also didn’t know what to say. Being tongue-tied around Steve was a new sensation.

Steve, thankfully, continued. “Do you remember that first week?” he asked. “When we met? You know, it’s been—turning and turning, in my head, this one memory. It’s inescapable. It was after Sir Phillips, after I met Doctor Erskine, after the fever. After I just met you. We were—six. You didn’t—couldn’t—visit me, that first week, and I asked after you constantly. So constantly, in fact, that Doctor Erskine came to me and sat me down and told me—told me that I should not expect you, because princes have different circles, met different people: dukes, earls, ambassadors. Knights.”

Bucky didn’t dare to move. He didn’t dare to do anything but let out the words, “I didn’t know.”

“I guess I never told you.” Steve’s lips curved into a smile. Bucky wanted to lean over and—he didn’t know, he didn’t know. “All I’m trying to say is— We haven’t really talked in a couple of weeks for your cousins’ visit, and before that, for that survey of the kingdom with your father. I just wasn’t used to it. For these past weeks, I’m sorry. I missed you.”

“Oh,” he said again. He struggled for his next words, between  _ It’s not your fault _ and  _ We both had duties to the castle _ , before settling on “I’m sorry too.” He thought about it for a bit. “You know, it’s strange, but I really missed the certainty too.”

Steve’s brows furrowed. “Certainty?”

_ Our certainty. The certainty of us. Of you. Of you and me. _ What else could there be? “Of, you know—knowing that I won’t be the shortest person in the room.”

Bucky was thwacked with one of his pillows.

“This what you came to say?” Bucky then asked.

“Yeah,” Steve laughed. “Yeah, you cold-hearted jerk.”

“You plan on staying the night here?”

“Why not?” Steve said easily. “I can just pretend to be one of the lumps on your knobbly knees again.”

It would have been that easy, Bucky thought in amazement. But this, too, was the curse of knowing someone too well.

“How many patients did you tell Doctor Erskine you would take on this week with Peggy?” he asked.

Steve was silent for a while. “Twenty?” he said.

Bucky sighed. “Get out of my bed, you unwashed peasant, and go back to the clinic. I know you’d much rather be grinding up medicine than here.”

“I hate grinding up medicine.”

“But you love saving people,” Bucky replied. He nudged Steve’s leg with a booted toe. “Go on. Or are you saying that you’d much rather cuddle with me like a tender-hearted maiden than save people’s lives? I’m drunk, not stupid. Shoo.”

Steve hesitated, which was all the encouragement Bucky needed.

“I mean, if you insist on lying with me,” Bucky drawled, “I suppose I could teach you a few tricks that the maid showed me the other day.”

“Leaving, leaving,” Steve said quickly. “I’ll see you soon, Bucky.”

“Oh yes. We’ll be able to gossip like usual again in a few more days!” Bucky cried out in a falsetto. “Can’t  _ wait _ to tell you what Lady Browne did with her  _ hair.” _

“God,” Steve said, but there was mirth in his voice.

The door slammed shut.

In the silence, Bucky realized that the thick, drowsy press of the wine had long abated, and for a long while, he could not sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to all those who kudo’d, commented, and/or lurked in this story. As before, if you can, please tell me what you thought of the chapter. :)


	3. The Asgardian Delegation (Part II)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A newcomer arrives at the tournament. Bucky realizes the truth of his feelings for Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have any Bucky NOTPs, consider looking at the bottom note.
> 
> Again, remember the chapter one warning: badly researched depictions of everything.

The rest of the week passed in its usual pomp and clamour, ceremony and grandeur. There were tours Bucky had to give to the first-time members of the delegation, meetings to amend the alliance treaty that more often than not turned up nothing, and complaints to be addressed by some of the younger Asgardian noblemen, including Loki. The penultimate day ended with the annual Gifting, in which Thor presented on behalf of his parents a circular shield made of magic-tempered steel, the culmination of the work of a hundred warlocks and royal smiths. Bucky thought it impressive until Thor demonstrated its prowess by throwing it across the room, where it bounced off a wall with perfect elasticity and hit Hodge straight between the shoulders, knocking him down. As Hodge picked himself up, his face a burning red, and the Scildan lords around Bucky clapped in approval, Bucky caught his cousin’s eyes and raised an eyebrow. _Really? A rubber discus?_ Thor grinned and shrugged.

Steve, as expected, was running around town with Peggy all week. Bucky would see them sometimes, stalking across the castle corridors with no small sense of purpose. Bucky would check, too, the loosened rock near the library room, but Steve’s letters were always scrawled out, messy and brief.

So Bucky endured it all until the very last day, for Scildan’s annual and most renowned sporting tournament.

This season’s tournament proved to be good fun, like previous years. There were some moments of exception, of course: Loki dominated more and more of the mages’ portion of the competitions, rendering those outcomes anticlimactic. Bucky had to excuse himself from his seat during the archery bout, and he returned to find a bearded Asgardian knight receiving a velvet feather cap for his victory. Otherwise, Scildan’s and Asgard’s knights were on the whole evenly matched, with some second- and third- place victories here and there for a few of the foreign knights. One of the young Scildan magicians-in-training, Kruger, actually managed to secure a first-place victory in the magicians’ side of the wrestling contest—Loki did not participate in that round, deeming the sport too close-contact for his aristocratic skin.

Bucky participated only in the quarterstaff competition, taking second place when Sir Dugan’s staff slid up his to give Bucky’s neck a light tap.

“You’ve still gotta watch that blind spot on your left, little prince,” the knight whispered to Bucky, all conspiratorial, as they received their medals. “But your technique has improved.” He winked. “Maybe you’ll even beat me one day.”

The magicians did not sword fight, so following the knights’ jousting tournament, all equipment was cleared away. Instead, a large circle was drawn in the dusty field, and the finalists—determined that morning—stepped within the circle’s bounds. Loki was visibly yawning as he spun his staff, while the young man opposing him marked his opponent’s steps with grim determination.

“Your brother looks relaxed, as usual,” Bucky commented to Thor, who had returned to his seat after the joust.

“Well,” Thor laughed, “I do wish I am of the same level when it comes to sword fighting. And that’s a great compliment to him.”

“By complimenting yourself at the same time?”

“A great warrior can acknowledge another’s strength but still recognize his own,” Thor said.

“Such horseshit, coming from you,” Bucky said, and Thor laughed.

Scildan’s chief magician, a squat man named Zola, and one of the Asgardians’ own magicians plunged their staffs into opposite ends of the circle’s diameter. The contest began.

Bucky had grown up with Doctor Erskine as a reference point for all things magic. To him, magic was a tool; magic could slide shelves so heavy not even Peggy could move, magic could levitate a sick man into a stretcher. Even though he had met more of the mages under his father’s staff, some part of Bucky would always characterize Doctor Erskine’s magic as Scildan’s—protective, inward. Useful.

Loki, then, Bucky would always associate with Asgardian magic. It shimmered and blazed, and the attacks whizzed across space like a wild child. When his opponent’s stun spells hit Loki’s force shield, sparks flowered in the air and across the field. Bucky had watched the growth of Loki’s showmanship since Bucky was ten, and Loki was eleven, and each year Loki appeared to add another layer of spectacle, and his magic became something that forced awe down its observer’s throats.

This duel lasted longer than Loki’s usual bouts, but the reason for the delay became clear quickly. The young magician’s wisps of magic, even the most direct and defensible, were allowed to hit Loki’s magic shields. Loki did not attack. He was catching the shots for the excuse of deflecting them in the forms of whirlwinds, or crashing waves, or the shadowy griffin that bore its teeth and frightened Loki’s opponent into jumping a step back. All of the creations were harmless, only serving to humiliate and frustrate his opponent. The young man advanced still on Loki but appeared no closer to winning. The scattered laughter from the audience stand must be audible even in Loki’s large spectacles.

Then the magician decided to take a last attempt at victory. Bucky was sitting in the very first row, and he witnessed the next moment with a clear view: the spear carved from dirt, creeping upwards into the air; Loki’s face upturned as he conjured a blossoming thundercloud with crackling thunder; the spear, zipping through the air; Loki’s shocked face, as he was stabbed two inches above the belt of his tunic.

A silence followed, louder than the cheers that had filled the stands earlier.

Next to Bucky, Thor’s body turn rigid as Loki collapsed and sprawled forward. Blood soaked the grass beneath his slit tunic. In a distance, Bucky could see Doctor Erskine hold onto both Steve’s and Peggy’s shoulders. Doctor Erskine had a way of sensing things like death, and perhaps he could already call it for the prince.

The young magician’s face was ashen as he sank to his knees and crawled toward Loki’s body. The king—the king would execute him for sure. He was a Scildan citizen. The death of the second-in-line to the Asgardian throne was much more costly than this nameless magician alone—his death would only begin the compensation Scildan would have to return to Asgard.

Then, as the young magician held a trembling hand over the bloodied body, a disk of smoke gathered behind him. Sensing something, the man turned back, and then a giant serpent—its teeth as long as knights’ swords—leapt from the ground and gaped open its bloody mouth.

“End,” chanted the elder magicians from Scildan and Asgard at once, on the opposite sides of the circle.

The young magician looked down and realized the same thing everyone else did—his hand had crossed the boundary on the ground. Beside him, the body of Loki faded into nothing. The snake held its form for a second more before shrinking back into the form of a man. When the scales receded, there was the Asgardian prince, grinning maniacally.

Loki’s jokes did not seem so funny, now that they were played on everyone. A terse silence had been drawn over the stands as Loki accepted yet another medal. His opponent stood up and waved away the gift, to return to the tent with the rest of Scildan’s magicians.

Only Thor was laughing and clapping. “Brother, you really hoodwinked me with that last trick!” he called out, while Loki seemed to ignore him pointedly. “Very clever. Very well done.”

The noblemen surrounding Bucky followed suit in nervous, chittering laughter. A round of applause swelled uncertainly, half-heartedly, before deflating the next second. Bucky glanced at the king, who looked, as usual, disinterestedly regal. His mother smiled wanly as she surveyed Loki’s last bows, below. When she made eye contact with Bucky, her shoulders moved up to a barely perceptible shrug. Maybe it wasn’t just a Loki thing, then, Bucky thought, turning back to the scene below. Maybe it was an Asgardian thing.

Sword fighting, due to its popularity with the people, was the only event that showcased its semi-finals after the morning’s elimination rounds. As Loki exited, Thor stood up and hopped over the railing, and this time the cheers were genuine. The stage was reset for the match as he was fitted with armour, and his reentrance doubled the avalanche of loud approval. Thor enjoyed a good show like the rest of his people, but he defeated his opponent—a young Scildian blond a few years Bucky’s senior—with princely grace. After sheathing their swords, they held their hands in the air as warrior equals, and the previous tensions seemed nothing more.

Then Sir Dugan was defeated.

It happened too fast for anyone to process. One second, their swords were glimmering smooth and languid between Sir Dugan and his opponent. Then Sir Dugan was on his back, his weapon landing half a field away. Sir Phillips, as one of the two arbitrators, gathered his wits the quickest, and before Bucky really understood the fact—that Sir Dugan had _lost_ —Sir Phillips was pronouncing his opponent the winner. Sir Dugan rose slowly and plucked his sword from the ground, never turning away from his opponent. When he lifted his visor, Bucky could see that his eyes were wide with astonishment.

The atmosphere was similarly muddied with confusion. Murmurs swirled among the stands. Bucky spotted a child tugging at his mother’s tunic, near the cheaper seats, and his mother dragging him onto her lap with a wild and worried look.

Bucky only recognized the knight—black armour, thin stretches of red—as a member of one of the more distant orders. He remembered nothing of the knight’s performances in previous tournaments, in Scildan or otherwise, and they could not have been very remarkable—the need to know the strength of potential enemies was something Bucky understood well, in the many lectures from his father. Bucky only remembered the knight’s consistent, solid, but ordinary performance in the preliminaries that morning, when Gabriel was beaten out of the competition in a close match.

When the participants were called forward for the final round, Thor, mountainous Thor, seemed to overpower the mystery knight by simply standing nearby: the latter was thin and a head shorter, with the lanky build of a young man but without the height. The audience sensed this difference in their physique too, and along with it the stinging sense of foul play: the resulting boos piled on and on. Near Bucky, a few greener members of the Asgardian delegation, who had never seen Sir Dugan in motion or, indeed, teach a younger Thor, sniggered. Some of Scildan’s own people were calling for a rematch between the knight and Sir Dugan, but Sir Dugan was standing at the far edge of the field with some of his fellow knights, his helmet beneath his arm, and he made no move to join the crowd.

The two arbitrator called for the match to begin, and it did, but without the flurry of motion that began and ended the match with Sir Dugan. Thor seemed hesitant for once in his life, and he made shallow attempts at lunges and jabs that were blocked easily. Thor then launched an attack of a longer sequence. That, too, was disassembled. Finally, Thor broke out of sequence and attacked on his own terms, in heavy blows with his famously unsurpassable strength. But his opponent stepped in and out of those, as if the fight was nothing but a light dance.

It reminded Bucky, eerily, of Loki’s earlier match.

“Are you doing this?” Bucky hissed at Loki, across Thor’s empty seat.

“I wish I was,” Loki said, positively mourning. Then his gleeful grin returned. “My, my dear brother does look like he’s struggling, doesn’t he? I haven’t seen that in a long while. It’s a good look on him.”

“I swear, if you paid some mercenary to disrupt the peace between our countries for your stupid sense of inferiority—”

“You know I would never do that,” Loki said airily. Then he looked at Bucky, and with blazing eyes, said, “Not until I’m king.”

This was getting into some serious, potentially treasonous matter that was out of Bucky’s realm of jurisdiction. So he turned away. More importantly, however Bucky’s gut also told him Loki wasn’t in on this. The mystery knight did not have the bedazzling quality of Loki’s performances, only a quiet, sound display of skill. That was an art in and of itself too—the way the knight’s sword clashed with Thor’s, the way it arched so smoothly through the air, like a ribbon almost, with the knight a dancer.

It was over soon enough, with no more surprises. Thor was pushed back gradually, gradually, until he began to slip and fall prey to his own inflexible, hulking figure. Several times he recovered—skillfully—from a near fall, before finally his sword was slipped from his grip in an expert twirl of his opponent’s blade, and the match was called.

Thor knelt, panting, by his opponent’s feet. His opponent stuck out an arm to shake his hand—a gesture of goodwill—but Thor shook his head and stood up on his own. “Good sir,” he said, “do me the honors, at least, of removing your helmet so I can see the man who has defeated me, as equals, for the first time in my life.”

The other knight paused, then lifted off the heavy metal bascinet.

What followed was only something Bucky could describe as petrification, all around him. But the knight was not a monster, a wanted outlaw of Scildan, or a half-crazed thirtieth-in-line to the throne. The knight was a woman.

 _Females are weak,_ Bucky remembered his father trying to impress upon him, long ago. _Do not trust them._ He remembered seeing his mother freeze, on the other side of the endless dining table, as those words bounced about in the fine china and silverware, the golden roasted turkey and delicately kneaded wine. How strange those words were—not only strange because they were untrue, but because of how contradictory they seemed. Common wisdom dictated that strength was untrustworthy, that power usurped. But looking now around the audience, at their looks of horror compared to Thor’s mere surprise, Bucky now thought he understood the origin of that contradiction to be fear.

The king was sitting upright now, but immobile, as if pasted to his seat. Bucky saw his mother’s hand around the king’s. He himself began to feel a sort of alarm. Sir Phillips was resting at the edges of the sparring circle, holding a golden circlet, waiting for the king’s signal. The female knight herself was relaxing on the field, her weight on one leg, her eyes roaming over the citizens of Scildan placidly. Thor had stood up and blinked confusedly at the silent crowd, before he was drawn into a realization. Asgard, Bucky realized, was the only one of the Nine Kingdoms that tolerated female warriors. There was a cultural disconnect here.

Next to Sir Dugan, a couple of Scildan’s knights looked ready to draw their blades. The female knight swung her gaze immediately their way and casually—or so it was acted—flipped the grip on her own sword. The tension was suddenly scorching. Bucky’s mind flashed to the soldiers and mages he had seen with his father near Jötunheimr. He wondered if he would need to draw his sword, too, to join in, and he thought, _I’m not ready for this_.

Someone began clapping.

Peggy Carter stood at the outer edge of the medical tent, applauding fiercely. Soon there was Steve, joining her, his thin chest sticking out like some overfluffed bird. They looked ridiculous, the pair of them, sounded ridiculous: a pair of peasant kids brokering that thin layer of peace within a nation—perhaps between two nations if Asgard was drawn into this whole mess. But Steve looked up at Bucky with something like total trust, and then Bucky was clapping too, startling the noblemen around him. Then the queen was joining in. Then her entire entourage, then the surrounding ladies, and lords, and common people in rippling motion, before finally the king joined in, slowly, reluctantly.

The female knight—the foreign knight—who stood in the center of all these strange political forces raised her eyebrows in seemingly mild surprise. Her eyes swept toward the medical tent, where Peggy was still standing, taller than her stature. Then her eyes cut toward Bucky, who was so caught in them that he tuned out the rest of the world until Loki elbowed him in the ribs.

“That grouchy commander of yours wants you down there,” Loki said, nodding toward Sir Phillips.

Bucky left his seat bewildered. When he arrived to Sir Phillips, the man shoved the circlet in Bucky’s hands.

“Your father the king’s orders,” Sir Phillips explained.

“Just now?”

Sir Phillips nodded. “I do hope I’m not misinterpreting his chin-points and head nods. But I’ve served with him for long enough to know.” He gestured toward the victor of the last match. “Do the honors, my prince.”

As Bucky marched across the field, the crowd quieted. The knight, long sensing Bucky’s approach, had dropped to one knee but stared at him with open curiosity. Bucky stopped in front of her and prepared to recite the usual crowning speech, but he realized he did not know the knight’s name at all.

“May you—” His voice cracked. He coughed. A few of the ladies in the stands laughed in understanding. “May you declare your name and order?”

She blinked once, guileless. “My name is Natasha Romanoff,” she said, and though the name was foreign, the accent was not. “I am—” she glanced down at her armor and smiled, a little amused, “—of the Eimen Order. I suppose.”

“Well,” said Bucky. There was no female knight from that order, he was certain. “Sir—Lady Natasha of Eimen, you have demonstrated your skill and victory with the sword, and Scildan congratulates you on your victory.”

“Thank you, your highness,” she said. “If I may speak, however, I have a small request.”

“What is it?” Bucky asked.

“I understand that it is permissible to ask for a change of trophy as fitting for a knight’s customs.”

“That is true.”

“I understand also that the circlet is the established gift of this event in the tournament. But I am a young girl only—” her smile widened, but her head was tilted in such a way that only Bucky could see her expression, “—and I have been told that too much gold is unbefitting for a young woman. Therefore I ask for a maiden’s dearest wish: a kiss from the prince.”

Chatters rose from above. Then the king rose his hand, and there was immediate silence. Bucky, bewildered, looked at the king for advice. His father nodded.

“I will grant that,” Bucky said.

There was a chorus of loud giggles from the ladies. Bucky had not even known how a chorus of loud giggles sounded until then.

Their positioning was awkward—by more than just their stations, Bucky felt like the princess gifting his savior with a kiss—but the knight of Eimen did not stand, and so Bucky stepped forward once, and leaned down.

In the brief years since his discovery of the opposite sex, Bucky had kissed eager, flustered maids and languid, smiling women. He had always complemented them, giving gentle pecks to the corners of shy lips and yielding to the rhythms of the more experienced. But Natasha of Eimen was neither girlishly eager nor silently seductive. She knelt, as proper as any knight, and watched him approach with a show of vague curiosity.

Bucky kissed the back of her hand first, before leaving a soft peck on her lips. The crowd behind him was wild. He stood. Cannons at the outer edge of the field blew confetti into the ring, signalling the end of the tournament. The colorful papers drifted over Bucky’s hair and his shoulders like a snow flurry.

The knight was now staring at him attentively, and then her eyes flickered away, as if disappointed. He didn’t know what to make up that. He looked to the audience. The ladies sitting above them were giggling furiously still, and even the men were chuckling in paternal indulgence. What they saw before them was a display of youth, as lovely as a fairytale. Yet Bucky, on the other hand, felt an almost intense sense of nothing: he had performed his princely duties, and that was that.

Across his field of vision, Bucky saw a familiar shape move. He adjusted his weight and craned his neck, but the figure had ducked into a tent, and Bucky could no longer tell whether it had been Steve Rogers.

—

Bucky was summoned to the chambers of Queen Winifred and found the king’s attendants, too, standing in the antechamber. He left his own attendants there, in what would certainly soon become an arena of ego battles, and pushed through the doorway.

Even though he had known, logically, that the king himself would be present, it was still a shock to see him lounging in his mother’s ornate sofa in the seat that was usually Bucky’s. At nearly the opposite end of the room, his mother lingered by the open window, her hand atop the sill. They looked up at the same time when Bucky entered.

Bucky twisted his head between the two of them. “Mother, you, uh— Your majesties wished to see me?”

“Good, it’s about time you got here,” said the queen, smiling. She walked toward him, rubbing circles on his back as she led him to the king. “We have a minor thing to consult with you.”

The queen took a seat in her usual place, now across the king. It was a one-person seat, and the only room in this little placement of furniture was next to the king, but Bucky found it impossible to sit there, and so he perched on the arm of his mother’s chair.

“This won’t take long,” the king said in preamble. “You’ve witnessed the same—that a girl, a foreigner no less, has taken the title of champion in our tournament.”

“Yes,” Bucky said.

“Her little request at the end has soothed most of the more dim-witted courtiers,” said the king. “But of course, that did not change the facts of the game: she has defeated the greatest knights of both Scildan and Asgard. Her mystery poses a great danger to the stability of both of our armies, and more so Scildan. The laws of hospitality prevent us from capturing her, as it would have been ordered otherwise.”

“Your majesty,” Bucky began. He thought it an unfair assessment, overblown, because there were such tales all the time: of foreign knights in obscure orders aiding the poor in the countryside, and of female orders too.

“I want you to speak to her in the festival tonight,” the king cut through. “She seems to have taken a liking to a young prince, and we can fold that into our advantage. Mimic the language of lovers as you pry into her origins, particularly for whom she works—see if you can make her let slip of her source of strength, whether it be from a more powerful warlock or another lord. Do not fail us, James.”

Thus finished, the king stood, swept his robes about him, and left the room.

“Mother,” Bucky said, standing too. “He’s asking me to spy on a guest to the kingdom. That was unreasonable—”

“Your father is right, Bucky.”

“What?” he asked, not angrily but in complete amazement. He had never known his mother to agree with his father on anything. “Mother, she is a woman, but—”

“You were there, Bucky. It remains the truth that a previously nameless foreigner has upended the usual rankings of our tournament—which is a place, no matter how you look at it, where nations send their best and knights in turn bring back respect for their kings. This, after Loki played that good little trick that had frightened us all.” She smiled, sadly. “I’m sorry to ask this of you, my son.”

“I—” He circled a corner of the room and returned with another objection on his tongue. “Mother, but don’t you find this unfair? Just because she’s a woman—”

She lifted an eyebrow, and he was immediately chastised.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Of course it’s unfair,” she said. “But it is not about what _I_ think should be the matter, or what _you_ think should be the matter—or even what your _father_ thinks. No matter what sort of tyrants some of the lords of the court want to paint your father and I as, us three, we’re all bound by the duties to this nation. We must be responsive to the public perception of right and wrong in this nation, even as we attempt to encourage others to see what we know as right and wrong.”

“There must be change, somehow,” Bucky said, sullenly.

“And there can be. It is just that…” and then she paused, and seemed to not able to speak any more.

And there Bucky caught the glimpse of the past, then, of a young girl shipped from the fierce, free lands of Asgard to dry and barren Scildan, to be wedded to a man who would not permit female knights in his army. Perhaps she stowed away her archery gloves for embroidery; perhaps she cut up her hair bands and replaced them with the delicate gold butterfly pins and wired pearls. He wondered if she had mourned, and then wiped away her tears. He wondered how the abstract concept of a marriage alliance could force away her many loves. He wondered but did not ask; he did not know at all if this was true, even though he thought he knew. It felt invasive, like he was crossing some boundary to see his mother as anyone other than a mother. Yet at the same time, he thought he was catching the fragments of a great tragedy.

“Mother,” he said again, more softly now. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: Thor mentioned that you were trained in archery, back in Asgard?”

Her lips tipped up in a quiet smile. “Oh, I’ve not only been trained, Bucky. I was quite the master.”

“You never mentioned this.”

She rubbed her face and let out a long exhale. “Sometimes—sometimes it is better to never voice your want.”

“Can you teach me, sometime?” he asked. When she looked like she was about to smile and refuse, he said, “It’s not what you want—” though it was precisely that, or so he hoped, “—it’s what your son wants. Your young, stupid, arrogant son. I can tell the king that. I tell my friends—they can say they want to learn Asgardian techniques. You can teach us.”

She laughed wetly, and Bucky realized that there were tears in her eyes. “Maybe, maybe.”

—

A bonfire festival always closed the Asgardians’ visits; by dawn they would be back on their tall white horses, and the festivities would be replaced by the dour work of clean-up. But for now, couples young and old danced around the blazing flame as pipers played their merry little tunes. Fanning from the bonfire were street vendors selling candied apples or little trinkets, clamoring for the attention of Asgardians and the Scildan townspeople alike.

Bucky spent the first half an hour searching for Natasha of Eimen and seemed to find everyone else in the castle but her. For a quick couple of minutes he joined with Jim and Gabriel and Jacques and Montgomery in a round of beer and then disentangled himself just as quickly when he saw a flash of red hair, but it was only one of the milkmaids in town. A couple of the younger servant girls from the castle looped their arms with his form a dance, but he politely declined. Finally he saw Steve, his head whipping around—perhaps also looking for Bucky—and Bucky was about to wave at him when he saw Peggy next to him. Instead, he quietly slipped between two circles of dancing townspeople, away from view.

He made his way up a small hill, toward the castle, and sat near a broken-down wheelbarrow to watch the scenes of merriment below. He looked for that flash of red hair, but though the color would be immediately distinguishable in other occasions, it was lost with the wavering firelight. So he found himself, more often than not, watching Steve—watching as that blurred dot of him tugged Peggy along to an herb shop, a magic show, a carnival game, a dance.

It was a chilly night without the fire nearby, and after an hour or two sitting where he was, Bucky thought himself frozen into a mold of a person, only his thoughts free to move. It was then that Natasha of Eimen found him.

“I had been looking for you,” was her greeting, from behind him.

“God help me,” was his response—and he didn’t scream out those words or jump onto his feet like a child. He didn’t.

Eimen was watching him with clear amusement in her features. “Sorry for startling you, your highness.”

“You didn’t,” he said quickly.

She let him have that. “Do you mind if I stay here for a while?” she asked. “I’m not used to festivals.”

“Oh,” he said. “Of course. Please feel free.”

“Thank you,” she said, and sat daintily.

“How’s Scildan treating you?” he asked.

“Fine. It is always good to explore the world. See other people.”

“Is it…different, here, compared to where you live?”

She looked at him, seemed to look through him, through all the poorly disguised intentions and shoddy plans. The pale green in her irises seemed ever more washed of color in the dull light. “No,” she said. “Not much different at all.”

She appeared to be a completely different person without her bulky, almost ill-fitting, armor. She was shorter than him—shorter than even Steve, perhaps—with all the soft curves associated with a girl. Yet she had beaten Sir Dugan and Thor both in a sword fighting competition. Her red hair shone.

“Admiring something?” she asked, her lips curved into a smile.

“W-what?” he said. “No— No, sorry, I was just—”

She waved his words away. “I know. I was—joking. Your highness,” she said. Her voice had a lazy, rolling sort of quality, an affectation maybe. But Bucky detected mischief too. A real soul. “To be honest, I didn’t immediately approach you when I found you. I watched you for a little while. I know your eyes had been following her—the beautiful girl with the beautiful wavy hair.”

 _What girl?_ was his immediate question. Then he realized. Peggy. She had thought he was looking at Peggy.

She read that flash of confusion on his face too, and at the same time that opened her features to a soft sense of understanding. She returned her focus back to the celebrations below and pulled her knees to her chest.

“Do you ever feel—bound?” she asked.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said.

“Well, like what that means. Like you know you can—” she was opening and closing her palm, “—stretch out your legs more, lift your arms higher. But when you try you find that you can’t. So you shrink back into yourself tighter than ever so that you can, maybe, someday forget that you ever _couldn’t_ do those things.”

“That’s not what I think when I think of ‘bound’ at all.”

“But do you understand the feeling?”

He wanted to say no, that was ridiculous. But. He thought of hours of observation from afar, of being called prince and the future sovereign of a nation and yet— “I do,” he admitted. “I think I do.”

She nodded. “I can’t tell you where I really came from,” she said,  “because I’ve been spellbound—literally—against some truths.”

The sudden display of honesty startled him. He stayed silent, listening. She pulled out a rose pin from the underside of her tunic and rubbed her thumb across it like she was clear the surface of a mirror.

“You see,” she continued, matter-of-fact, turning the pin in her hand, “there is a deep, uncontrollable beastliness within me. I was cursed when I was very young, by very bad people, but today—” she clenched the pin tightly in her hand, “—I felt one of the spells broke. I have something of mine back, and I will run away, far away, before they can collar me completely again.”

“Are you still—bound, then?”

Her lips curved into a smile, the cat-like one, used to disguise herself. “Yes,” she said. “Unfortunately, it seems that a prince’s kiss is not cure enough.”

“Oh,” was the only thing he could think of saying.

“But I can control myself for now.” She laid her chin on the top of her knees. “I won’t be returning to Scildan, Prince James. Not for a long time, at least. Tell the king that.” She tilted her head to look at him. “I’m sorry. That’s all the specifics I can give to you.”

“No—no worries,” he said, still not quite sure what to make of it all.

“He’s down there,” she said suddenly, pointing at the foot of the hill, and she was right. Steve was lying on the ground with Peggy by his side, apart from the crowd but not completely separate. They were pointing at the stars.

“The man who left me spellbound had many books,” she said. “Some of them of poems. I would steal them, before I knew what I was doing. Would you like to hear one of them?”

“Yes, please,” Bucky said.

Bucky would fear for his father’s disappointment later, after he saw Thor and Loki off the main gates of the Triskelion and turned to kneel in front of his father by the castle entrance. But his worries would be for naught, because, as the king would explain, he had not thought much of Bucky’s attempt anyway—it had only been a safeguard, and a few of the king’s knights had been pursuing the Eimen knight for hours then. Bucky would accept those words for the casual snub they were but think back, to these few hours with her, and know also that Natasha of Eimen would never be caught.

For now, Natasha closed her eyes, leaned back, and began to recite her poem. As she did, Bucky’s mind was inundated with memories—of him and Steve, stealing pieces of cake from the kitchen to give to children on the streets; him and Steve, wrestling by a river until they had rolled in and washed by a baker’s shop; him and Steve, falling asleep next to each other, tired, fevered, or bruised; him and Steve, watching the dawn break, the dusk fade, or the moon ascend slowly across the sky. He understood then, the emotions he had been feeling, the deep ache in his chest, and the yearning, pressing down on him with the weight of the sky.

 _Your eyes two will slay me suddenly_   
_I may the beauty of them not sustain_ _  
So wounds it throughout my heart keen._

 _And but your word will heal hastily_   
_My heart’s wound, while that it is green,_   
_Your eyes two will slay me suddenly;_ _  
I may the beauty of them not sustain..._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter features a consensual, non-romantic Bucky/Natasha kiss.
> 
> The ending poem is part of Chaucer’s “Merciles Beaute,” translated very literally from Middle English.
> 
> Please leave a comment if you liked this chapter. :)


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